Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms among caretakers of COVID 19 and caretakers of non COVID 19 patients: A comparative study

Abstract

All over the world, the public is being informed about the physical effects of COVID-19 infection and protocols are being made to prevent exposure to the corona virus and manage symptoms of COVID‐19 if they appear. However, the effects of this pandemic on individual’s mental health and behavior have not been studied in detail and are still not known. Efforts are being made to focus on understanding the clinical features, routes of transmission, epidemiology, and management of the COVID‐19 outbreak, there has been very little concern expressed over the effects on one's mental health and on strategies to prevent stress. The aim of this study was to assess the post traumatic stress disorder symptoms among the care takers of COVID-19 patients and care takers of non COVID-19 patients and compare the results to explore the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of the population associated with the COVID-19 patients. This may help in future in early detecting the post traumatic stress disorder associated with covid-19 or any other pandemic and may help in taking early measures to avoid it and improve the mental health of general population. The study finding revealed that among care takers of covid-19 patients majority of study subjects (93.3%) had complicated PTSD, (6.7%) had Diagnostic PTSD and none of the subjects had Partial PTSD whereas, among care takers of non covid-19 patients majority of study subjects (36.7%) had Partial PTSD, (26.7%) had complicated PTSD, (23.3%) had no PTSD and (13.3%) had diagnostic PTSD. This indicates that the covid-19 had more psychological impact on the care takers than any other life threatening disease. This may be due to fast dissemination of covid-19, more deaths attributed to the pandemic and care takers concern for his/her health. The study concluded that the covid-19 had more psychological impact on the care takers than any other disease conditions. So there is need to improve the strategies to reduce the risk of developing PTSD symptoms in this group of population.